THE FACE OF THE PLANET
Mon, Oct 28 at 7pm, Anthology Film Archives
Co-presented with MONO NO AWARE
Bill Basquin, Jerome Ellis, Ja’Tovia Gary and Jennifer Peterson in person. Discussion moderated by Flaherty NYC Co-Programmer Courtney Stephens, filmmaker and curator. Silent films accompanied by Jennifer Peterson (live narration) and Jerome Ellis (live music).
What can films about nature do in this time of ecological crisis? Tracing a line through three discrete eras and modes of filmmaking – early nature films from the 1920s, feminist work of the 1970s, and contemporary work that attempts to queer and decolonize nature – this evening explores constellations of the “natural.” With a focus on notions of wildness and endangerment, the program explores how living worlds have been constructed – as fierce, “feminine,” or under threat – and how these constructions have been rejected, reinterpreted, or embraced by filmmakers of different generations. Featuring films, performance, and live lecture, these works move us beyond the flatness of the screen to engage with matters of ecological concern in the actually existing material world.
FILMS
Percy Smith NATURE’S HANDIWORK 1921, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital.
ALASKA'S EIGHTH WONDER (REEL 2), ca. 1925, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital.
Ana Mendieta GRASS BREATHING ca. 1974, 3 min., super-8mm-to-digital.
Ana Mendieta CREEK 1974, 3 min, super-8mm-to-digital.
Ana Mendieta SILUETA DE ARENA 1978, 2 min., super-8mm-to-digital.
Barbara Hammer JANE BRAKHAGE 1972, 10 min., 16mm.
Bill Basquin DEER CENSUS, 2009, 8 min, digital.
Christina Battle, OIL WELLS: STURGEON ROAD & 97TH ST, 2002, 3 min, 16mm.
Ja’Tovia Gary GIVERNY I (NEGRESSE IMPERIALE), 2017, 6 min, digital.
Thirza Cuthland, LESS LETHAL FETISHES, 2019, 10 min, digital.
Anna Kipervaser and Rhys Morgan, NO GARDEN BEYOND, 2019, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital.
Total running time: 78 min.
SYNOPSES
Percy Smith, Nature Handiwork, 1921, 10 min, 16mm-to-digital.
Nature’s Handiwork presents the marvelous and critical stages of transformation of caterpillars, moths and butterflies. Through microscopic techniques, this silent film captures hidden nature's secrets in action and composes an alien and strange looking world.
This title by early British nature film pioneer Percy Smith was thought to be lost, until a 16mm print was discovered in the University of Southern California film archive a few years ago, and positively identified by Jennifer Peterson. Thanks to Dino Everett, archivist at the Hugh M. Hefner Moving Image Archive, for digitization.
Silent films accompanied by Jennifer Peterson (live narration) and Jerome Ellis (live music)
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Alaska’s Eighth Wonder (Reel 2), ca. 1925, 12 min, 16mm-to-digital.
The second reel of an orphaned 1925 nature documentary, the footage follows the movement and calving of glaciers. Viewed from the present, the film is transformed into a document of loss and vulnerability, a challenge to the “timeless” view of nature put forth by early naturalists.
Thanks again to Dino Everett for digitizing this print.
Silent films accompanied by Jennifer Peterson (live narration) and Jerome Ellis (live music)
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Ana Mendieta, Grass Breathing ca. 1974, 3 min, super-8mm-to-digital
In Untitled (Grass Breathing) Ana Mendieta is hidden underneath a piece of sod, from which she emerges slowly, heaving it up and down gently. Made in Iowa in a framed and single shot around 1974, this film is part of a series of performative and moving image works in which the artist’s body is immersed and shrouded within the landscape. (adapted from EAI and Film Comment)
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Ana Mendieta, Creek 1974, 3 min, super-8mm-to-digital
In Creek, Ana Mendieta rests immobile and peaceful in a rocky stream of glistening water. Made in San Felipe Creek during a 1974 visit to Oaxacana in Mexico, this short film, made in a framed and single shot, is part of a series of performative and moving image works in which the artist’s body is immersed and shrouded within the landscape. (adapted from EAI and Brooklyn Rail)
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Ana Mendieta, Silueta de Arena, 1978, 2 min, super-8mm-to-digital
In her moving image works, Ana Mendieta documents her hybrid forms, which she titled “siluetas,” fugitive and potent traces of the artist’s inscription of her body in the landscape. SILUETA DE ARENA presents, in a framed and single shot, a silueta of sand made in the summer of 1978 in Iowa. Surrounded and transformed by water, this vulnerable earth sculpture bonds materially and visually human and non-human forms, the female body and the earth. (adapted from Gallery Lelong)
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Barbara Hammer, Jane Brakhage, 1972, 10 min, 16mm
“A documentary on the pioneer woman, her wisdom, philosophy and common sense: Jane Brakhage as herself is the viewpoint rather than Jane Brakhage, wife of the filmmaker, Stan Brakhage.” (Canyon Cinema)
At the height of the second wave feminist movement, legendary filmmaker Barbara Hammer finds Jane Brakhage living with four children and her filmmaker husband deep in the Colorado woods. In this short, impressionistic documentary, the artistic potential of domestic life asserts itself as a surprise, as Jane discusses taking music lessons from a meadowlark, her thoughts about the term "housewife," and the connection between animals and humans as we share life on this planet.
This film was preserved by Electronic Arts Intermix and the Academy Film Archive through the National Film Preservation Foundation's Avant-Garde Masters Grant program and The Film Foundation. Funding provided by the George Lucas Family Foundation.
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Bill Basquin, Deer Census, 2009, 8 min, digital
Deer Census is composed entirely of still images, triggered by a trip wildlife camera on a man’s land in Texas. Paid to participate in the area’s deer census — a mechanism for understanding wildlife numbers and correspondingly issuing deer licenses — the man describes his relationship to this documentary exercise, and presents a darkly contemporary ordering of the natural world (predator, prey, bureaucracy), in which nature is instrumentalized through technology and sport. (adapted from Bill Basquin)
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Christina Battle, Oil Wells: Sturgeon Road & 97th St, 2002, 3 min, 16mm
Highlighting the repetitive nature of oil wells in northern Alberta, this hand processed film documents a sighting common to the Canadian prairies. (Christina Battle)
Shot in the artist’s home province in Alberta, the mechanical rising and falling of an oil well is subject to a suite of rephotography applications (recoloured, superimposed, speed changes). Views of far and near are juxtaposed. Theme and variations, not with a piano, but an oil derrick on a prairie field, rising and falling. (Mike Hoolboom)
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Ja’Tovia Gary, Giverny I (Négresse Imperiale), 2017, 6 min, digital
A filmic collage, featuring a mélange of video shot in Claude Monet's garden in Giverny, France, archival footage, and analog animation GIVERNY I (NEGRESSE IMPERIALE) examines the precarious nature of Black women’s bodily integrity and the ethics of care as resistance work. Set against the backdrop of the West's continued global imperialist campaigns and its historical artistic canon, this experimental video assert an oppositional gaze in the re-telling of modern history. (adapted from Paula Cooper Gallery)
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Thirza Cuthand, Less Lethal Fetishes, 2019, 10 minutes, digital
In her latest performance for the camera, Thirza Cuthand plays with gas masks and coloured smoke bombs to walk the line between fetish and her involvement with art world controversies including the Whitney Biennial Tear Gas Protest. This ‘sexy video about politics’ is an honest testimony about the power of petrochemistry, and our conflicted complicity in the industrial system. (adapted from Thirza Cuthand, and Native Spirit Film Festival)
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Anna Kipervaser and Rhys Morgan, No Garden Beyond, 2019, 11 min, 16mm-to-digital
“The dense fields of weeds waiting to entrap a vessel never existed except in the imaginations of sailors, and the gloomy hulks of vessels doomed to endless drifting in the clinging weed are only the ghosts of things that never were” (Rachel Carson)
Scenes from above, below and around the Sargasso Sea, a body of water unbounded by land where ecology and mythology have coexisted since before Juan de Bermúdez’s 1505 expedition. Where spirits whisper through the Island’s flora and fauna, only to be interrupted by the alternating currents of manmade ruin and regeneration. (Anna Kipervaser and Rhys Morgan)
ARTISTS IN PERSON
Bill Basquin is a San Francisco-based artist who works in film and video as well as installation art. In his practice, Bill focuses on a meaningful, methodical approach to art making, involving partnerships and communities rather than the artist in isolation. He has exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, New York; Documenta in Kassel, Germany; and the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.
Jerome Ellis is an Afro-Caribbean composer, improviser, multi-instrumentalist, and theater artist based in New York City. His concerts, performances, and texts are invitations to healing, transcendence, communion, and deep listening. Mr. Ellis' work has been presented or developed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Sundance Institute Theatre Lab, Lincoln Center, and WKCR. He’s a 2019 MacDowell Colony Fellow, a writer in residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and a 2015 Fulbright Fellow. Together with childhood friend James Harrison Monaco, he forms one half of the musician-storyteller duo James & Jerome. Their show Ink: A Piece for Museums (co-created with media designer Shawn Duan) was presented by the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Public Theater’s Under the Radar Festival 2019. He’s also a piano tuner and teacher, as well as a translator from Portuguese.
Ja’Tovia Gary is a filmmaker and artist based in Brooklyn, whose work spans documentary film to experimental video. A founding member of the New Negress Film Society, Gary was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25 New Faces of Independent Filmmaking in 2017. Her award-winning films have screened at festivals, cinemas, and institutions worldwide including Edinburgh International Film Festival, The Whitney Museum, Atlanta Film Festival, MoMa PS1, MoCA Los Angeles, Harvard Film Archives, New Orleans Film Festival, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.
Jennifer Peterson is a writer, teacher and researcher whose interests center on cinema and media history, experimental and educational films, aesthetics, and environmental history. She is the author of Education in the School of Dreams: Travelogues and Early Nonfiction Film (Duke University Press, 2013). She has published film, art, and book reviews in Millennium Film Journal, Film Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artforum.com. Her academic articles have been published in the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Camera Obscura, The Moving Image, the Getty Research Journal, and numerous edited collections. Peterson is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. She is working on a book entitled Cinema’s Wilderness Past: Film History, Nature and Endangerment Before 1960.
MODERATOR
Courtney Stephens is a filmmaker and programmer based in Los Angeles. Her non-fiction and experimental films have appeared at NYFF, SXSW, Hong Kong, Dhaka, Mumbai, and San Francisco International Film Festivals, DokuFest, Onion City, Orphans Film Symposium, The Exploratorium, and elsewhere. For the past five years she has co-programmed the Los Angeles microcinema Veggie Cloud, and guest-curated programs at Union Docs, The Getty, Museum of the Museum Image, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, a Fulbright Scholarship, and was recently named one of 25 New Faces of Independent Film by Filmmaker Magazine.
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STILL: Ja’Tovia Gary, Giverny I (NEGRESSE IMPERIALE) (still), 2017 film, 6 minutes, color single-channel video, stereo sound, HD and SD video footage dimensions variable © Ja’Tovia Gary. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York.